Stanley Hauerwas > Quotes

“Never think that you need to protect God. Because anytime you think you need to protect God, you can be sure that you are worshipping an idol.”
― Stanley Hauerwas

“Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God.”
― Stanley Hauerwas

“Jesus is Lord, and everything else is bullshit.”
― Stanley M. Hauerwas

“The courageous have fears that cowards never know.”
― Stanley Hauerwas

“The basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works, but rather who God is.”
― Stanley Hauerwas

“A social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid the creation of a people whose souls are superficial and whose daily life is captured by sentimentalities. They will ask questions like “why does a good God let bad things happen to good people ” such people cannot imagine that a people once existed who produced and sang the psalms. If we learn to say “God ” we will do so with the prayer “My God my God why have you forsaken me?”
― Stanley Hauerwas

“I fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need our protection. What God demands is not protection, but truth.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir

“The church is constituted as a new people who have been gathered from the nations to remind the world that we are in fact one people. Gathering, therefore, is an eschatological act as it is the foretaste of the unity of the communion of the saints.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, In Good Company: The Church as Polis

“For Christians do not place their hope in their children, but rather their children are a sign of their hope . . . that God has not abandoned this world.”
― Stanley Hauerwas

“As long as it is assumed that war is always an available option, we will not be forced to imagine any alternative to war.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir

“We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God's kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

“Mary-born Lord, humble us so that we also might say, "Let it be with me according to your word.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Prayers Plainly Spoken

“The church does not exist to provide an ethos for democracy or any other form of social organization, but stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have been formed by the story of Christ.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, A Community Of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic

“A Christian marriage isn’t about whether you’re in love. Christian marriage is giving you the practice of fidelity over a lifetime in which you can look back upon the marriage and call it love. It is a hard discipline over many years. (Duke Magazine Article, "Faith Fires Back," 2002)”
― Stanley Hauerwas

“Whatever it means to be a Christian, it at least involves the discovery of friends you did not know you had.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir

“Peace is a deeper reality than violence."
p. 231”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir

“The cross is not a sign of the church's quiet, suffering submission to the powers-that-be, but rather the church's revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers. The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God's account of reality more seriously than Caesar's. The cross stands as God's (and our) eternal no to the powers of death, as well as God's eternal yes to humanity, God's remarkable determination not to leave us to our own devices.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

“As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and and self-expression.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

“I do not put much stock in "believing in God." The grammar of "belief" invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. "Belief" implies propositions about which you get to make up your mind before you know the work they are meant to do.”
― Stanley Hauerwas

“My father was a better bricklayer than I am a theologian. I am still in too much of a hurry. But if the work I have done in theology is of any use, it is because of what I learned on the job, that is, you can lay only one brick at a time.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir

“The church occupies the space he has made so that the world may see what a people look like who are not determined by the destructive fantasy that we can secure our lives through violence.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Without Apology: Sermons for Christ's Church

“Mainline American Protestantism, as is often the case, plodded wearily along as if nothing had changed. Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and church leaders continued to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

“Gentleness is given to those who have learned that God will not have his kingdom triumph through the violence of the world, for such a triumph came through the meekness of a cross.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir

“The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer In Christian Ethics

“The loss of Christendom gives us a joyous opportunity to reclaim the freedom to proclaim the gospel in a way in which we cannot when the main social task of the church is to serve as one among many helpful props for the state.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

“When you are trying to change the questions, you have to realize that many people are quite resistant to such a change. They like the answers they have.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir

“The church… stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have been formed by the story of Christ.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, A Community Of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic

“I need to be clear. I am not suggesting that the individual wealthy person is dull. Rather I am suggesting that a social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid producing people whose souls are superficial and whose daily lives are captured by sentimentalities. They ask questions like, “Why does a good god let bad things happen to good people?” Such a people cannot imagine what kind of people would write and sing the Psalms.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian

“We believe that many Christians do not fully appreciate the odd way in which the church, when it is most faithful, goes about its business. We want to claim the church's "oddness" as essential to its faithfulness.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

“No powers determine our lives more completely than those we think we have under our control. I”
― Stanley Hauerwas, God, Medicine, and Suffering